Funding

With strong international backing, in 2010 Unitaid founded the Medicines Patent Pool, the first voluntary licensing and patent pooling mechanism in public health. Initially focused on improving the HIV response, Unitaid’s Executive Board approved the MPP’s entry into the fields of hepatitis C and tuberculosis in 2015. Unitaid is the MPP’s sole funder for these activities.

The MPP is currently operating under its second five-year grant from Unitaid (2016-2020).

About Unitaid

Unitaid is engaged in finding new ways to prevent, treat and diagnose HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria more quickly, more affordably and more effectively. It takes game-changing ideas and turns them into practical solutions that can help accelerate the end of the three diseases. The MPP is important in implementing Unitaid’s objectives by working with a range of organisations to license key medicines for generic manufacture.

Unitaid’s investments in the MPP have yielded 10.9 times the value of its funding, from price reductions of generic products. Savings are projected to reach 2.3 billion by 2028 for HIV medicines alone.

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The MPP model supports a collaborative approach among producers, universities, laboratories and others, and this makes it possible for many countries to have access to medicines at affordable prices.